Heather is an environmental geographer with expertise in human-nonhuman relations, alternative economies, technology and environmental justice, and feminism in the academy. She also contributes to the movements she works with and studies, through mapping, grounded theory, cartooning and more.

They teach ES&P integration courses along with Critical Cartography and Environmental Social Movements and Political Ecology of Animals. Their pedagogy is influenced by intersectional feminism and Paolo Freire’s liberatory education. They are especially keen on integrating creative activities into the classroom, from maps and comics to project-based work.

Heather is currently working on a project concerning multispecies justice at farmed animal sanctuaries. This project traced the rise of chicken sanctuary movements and explored how sanctuaries challenge the status of chickens and other agricultural animals as resources – both conceptually and through creating medical knowledge.

After a stint with the MGGG Redistricting Lab, Heather is continuing to work on the political geography of elections. In addition to contributing to a multi-state community mapping project to inform the current redistricting cycle, she plans to study whether and how environmental and environmental justice concerns are part of participatory redistricting.

She has also conducted research on the transnational hazardous waste trade and on digital green technology. As with their current projects, these also interrogated the politics of representation and participation.

Selected publications

Please contact me for copies of any of these should you find yourself behind a paywall.

Heather Rosenfeld. Witnessing Pandora: Doing “undone science” at chicken sanctuaries. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Forthcoming 2021.

Heather Rosenfeld, Sarah A. Moore, Robert E. Roth, Eric Nost, and Kristen Vincent. 2018. Hazardous aesthetics: A “merely interesting” toxic tour of waste management data. Geohumanities.

Heather Rosenfeld. 2017. Plug into choice? The trouble with common-sense participation in a smart electric grid. Capitalism Nature Socialism.

Heather Rosenfeld. 2017. Beyond the Old Boys’ Club? Gender relations at UW–Madison Geography from the 1970s to the present. Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership.

Sarah A. Moore, Robert E. Roth, Heather Rosenfeld, Eric Nost, Kristen Vincent, Mohammed Rafi Arefin, and Tanya M.A. Buckingham. 2017. Undisciplining environmental justice research with visual storytelling. Geoforum.